New Ordnance Survey Linked Data Site not just for Data Geeks

Ordnance Survey’s new linked data site went live today. You can read the official press release here. One of the major improvements to the site is the look and feel of the site, and as a result of this the site should be useful to people who don’t care about ‘scary things’ like APIs, linked data or RDF.

One key additional feature of the new site is map views (!) of entities in the data. This means the site could be useful if you want to share your postcode with friends or colleagues as a means of locating your house or place of work. Every postcode in Great Britain has a webpage in the OS linked data of the form:

http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/id/postcodeunit/POSTCODE

Examples of this would be the OS HQ postcode:

http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/id/postcodeunit/SO160AS

or the postcode for the University of Southampton:

http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/id/postcodeunit/SO171BJ

Click on either of these links you’ll see a map of the postcode – which you can view at various levels of zoom. You’ll also see useful information about the postcode such as its lat/long coordinate. More interestingly you’ll notice that it provides information about the ward, district/unitary authority, county (where applicable) and country your postcode is located in. So for the University of Southampton postcode we can see it’s located in the ward Portswood, the district Southampton and the country England.

Another interesting addition to the site is links to a few useful external sites such as: They Work For You, Fix My Street, NHS Choice and Police UK. This hopefully makes the linked data site a useful location based hub to information about what’s going on in your particular postcode area.

Why not give it a try with your postcode…:)

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